Monday, September 12, 2016

Cross Currents of THE ADAPTATION INDUSTRY (2012) - A Return to Simone Murray

In
2011-12 I had cause to review Simone Murray’s important work of adaptation
studies The Adaptation Industrythat adopted a materialist perspective by suggesting that industry
concerns often played far more significance in the way source-texts were
transformed into target texts in the major media.[i] While authors, directors, and other creative
workers had their parts to play, their concerns seemed less significant than
the desire for effective marketing and publicity. I reviewed the book twice, once in a short
note for amazon.com, which was largely positive,[ii]
and slightly less favorably in a review now available on academia.edu where I
suggested that Murray needed to be less essentialist in her approach and
acknowledge the vital contributions to the adaptive act of all individuals,
both in front of and behind the camera.[iii]

It’s remarkable how one’s
views can change over time. Two nights
ago I settled down to watch Two Tickets
to Broadway, an anodyne Howard Hughes musical from 1951 designed to
showcase the studio’s nascent talents, including singer Tony Martin, actors
Janet Leigh and Gloria DeHaven, and dancer Ann Miller. The film was essentially story-less, being
nothing more than a series of specialty turns performing in front of the
camera, including Bob Crosby (Bing’s lesser-known sibling) with a cardboard
cutout of his brother.[iv]

Nonetheless director James
V. Kern had created something of a framework for the film, as the three college
kids (Leigh, DeHaven, and Miller) traveled from their small town in Middle
America by Greyhound for the bright lights of New York, firmly convinced in
their own minds that they had the talent to succeed in the bigtime. The plot, endlessly recycled in Hollywood
movies since the days of Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, suggests that
individual talent will always win out despite the odds; if you have the drive
and the energy to succeed.

Once they arrived in the Big
Apple, however, they found their dreams thwarted at every opportunity by a
series of card-sharping agents, executives and other media types, who wanted
them simply to conform to particular stereotypes that they knew would work with
audiences. Hence Miller could not show
off her dancing skills, but rather try to combine classical with modern dance
in an awkward manner. The other two
women were reduced to chorus members trying to pretend they were enjoying
themselves performing in front of the microphone, when really they wanted to
branch out on their own.

None of this might seem
especially noteworthy, but it made me stop and reflect critically on what I had
previously thought about Murray’s work.
Although a firm believer in the potential of individual talent to change
the world around us, as well as ourselves, perhaps we are constrained in many
ways by the pressures of capitalism and success. I had recently encountered an article in the Guardian Weekly about the banking
industry since the Lehman Brothers collapse, and was shocked to find how much
of a culture of fear persists wherein “employment […] is a purely transactional
affair.” One worker was quoted as
saying: “When you can be out of the door in five minutes, your horizon becomes
five minutes.”[v] Times might be very different now as opposed
to sixty-five years ago, but the sense of precariousness remains; unless
individuals are prepared to conform to dominant industrial norms, irrespective
of their vocation, their futures are shaky.
It’s called the Logic of the Market.

Yet I still retain a naïve
belief in the power of individuals to negotiate that system – not by
“subverting” or “changing” it, but by finding ways to cope with it. Two
Tickets to Broadway retains a certain charm, as it shows how female bonding
manages to charm the hearts of even the most hard-hearted Broadway types and
managing to achieve success against the odds.
The film suggests the importance of looking into oneself and realizing
that there is an emotional core of one’s being that no one can touch, so long
as you can try to find it. This is not
just “self-belief” in the entrepreneurial sense, but has a lot to do with
discovering an ontological core at one’s center. This is what really gives us the potential to
adapt ourselves to different situations.

In theoretical terms, what
we have here are two cross-currents working in totally opposite
directions. As members of capitalist
societies, we have to respect the up-and-down trajectory of business, with
“success” at the top and “failure” at the bottom; when we fall, we are thrown
on the emotional and professional scrapheap.
Yet if we look into ourselves and find that joy (there is no other word
for it) that can keep us going, we might discover that life can be endlessly
fulfilling, with myriad possibilities for continual adaptation running
side-to-side in all directions, impossible to control.

The cross-currents involving
these two modes of life lies at the heart of any adaptive act, I believe. Working through them is an endless source of
intellectual as well as emotional fascination.